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During the installation of ubuntu from a USB key to a USB SSD, the bootloader was unintentionally placed on my laptop's internal Win10 drive. With the external SSD unplugged, Windows still booted OK - but the EFI boot menu only showed the "ubuntu" option.

I removed the inappropriate "ubuntu" listing from the boot menu by following steps from How do I remove "Ubuntu" in the bios boot menu? (UEFI) (removing the EFI entry with efibootmgr and deleting the ubuntu folder from the EFI partition), however the "Windows Boot Manager" entry is still missing from the boot menu, even though it is present in the EFI entries (see below). My BIOS does not have facilities to manually add boot entries, and it does not correct itself after successfully booting to Windows...

I have read the manual pages for efibootloader but I don't see anything obviously wrong, and I'm a little leery of messing with this without guidance. Can anyone help me figure out how to restore the Windows entry properly?

Output from efibootmgr (as viewed from the original LiveUSB key):

BootCurrent: 2001
Timeout: 2 seconds
BootOrder: 0004,0003,2001,2002,2006,2004,2005,0002,0000,0001,3001
Boot0000  Boot Device List
Boot0001  Diagnostic Menu
Boot0002  UiApp
Boot0003* HDD/SSD
Boot0004* Windows Boot Manager
Boot2001* USB Memory
Boot2002* USB ODD
Boot2004* LAN1
Boot2005* LAN2
Boot2006* FDD
Boot3001  HDD Recovery
Toglik
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  • This sounds like a hardware specific problem. Have you looked at the manufacturers technical support pages? – PonJar Aug 24 '20 at 09:04
  • @PonJar the company has terrible support, and products in certain regions aren't even documented on their sites. Hardware's not out of the question, but I was thinking more along the lines that Windows Boot Manager maybe being replaced by GRUB2. Though as it goes into a different folder on the ESP, I don't know why that would be necessary. Then again, I'm not well-versed enough in modern Linux or EFI in general to be able to do much more than guess... – Toglik Aug 25 '20 at 20:54
  • Just to confirm, you’ve deleted the Ubuntu folder in the EFI partition on your system but you don’t see a Windows entry in the bios/firmware interface. How do you boot Windows? I’d be inclined to check through the bios and make a note of any important settings and then reset the bios to factory defaults. You might find you can save your current settings to disk before doing that – PonJar Aug 25 '20 at 21:30
  • Correct, the EFI partition had folders for both ubuntu (now removed) and Windows. I'm not sure how it boots now, it just does... I can reset the default BIOS settings easily enough, my only concern is that the TPM signatures will get wiped (no way to manually enter these, either) and render the encrypted OS drive inaccessible. – Toglik Aug 27 '20 at 23:05

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